Word: klute
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...character, not investing him with quite the fanatical glitter a political gunman ought to exhibit. But you have to balance that against the reality of Ford's work--no one half-suppresses, half-reveals strong feelings better than he does--and director Alan J. Pakula's analogous strengths. Pakula (Klute, Presumed Innocent) develops his story patiently, without letting its tensions unravel. At a moment when everyone is saying the studios have lost the knack for making solid, broadly appealing entertainments, The Devil's Own suggests the skill may be only mislaid. Of course, it helps when you hire grownups...
Pakula, who has proved his ability to turn paranoid suspicions into scary reality (Klute, All the President's Men), gives his movie the dark glow we have come to expect from this genre. But we don't go to movies like this in search of stylish apercus. We go to see innocents like ourselves getting swept up by irresistible tides of terror. And to have the pants scared off us. That doesn't happen in The Pelican Brief. An airplane read has been turned into nothing more compelling than an airplane...
This little shocker is just the beginning of a long, ambitious first novel by a young Mississippian. The publisher has ordered up a 75,000-copy first printing. Director Alan Pakula (Klute, All the President's Men) has bought it for the movies. What Donna Tartt has attempted -- and largely brought off -- is a challenging combination of a mystery (will they get caught or won't they?), an exploration of evil, both banal and bizarre, and a generous slice of the world as seen by the author, a brainy graduate of Bennington who has mastered Greek and English literature...
...book is also the kind of material Alan J. Pakula was put on earth to direct. Klute, The Parallax View and All the President's Men are all marvelously intricate visions in which otherwise quite knowing individuals are slowly forced to the awareness that they are being victimized -- no, terrorized -- by other people's unscrupulous rage to maintain respectable order at any cost. Yet conscientiously as this movie has been made, it does not work as well as the novel did or as some of Pakula's other films have...